Ambazonian Barrister Chief Charles Achaleke Taku has been elected president of the International Criminal Court Bar Association replacing the renowned Karim Khan. His Royal Highness Chief Charles Taku is a Southern Cameroons lawyer with 30 years experience in the International Criminal Court and the Sierra Leone Tribunal including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha).

The Man of Law recently came under attack from Cameroon government Minister of Communication, Issa Tchiroma Bakary on his stance on the Southern Cameroons war. Chief Taku takes over from Karim Khan who defended the Kenyan Vice President William Ruto during the post-election violence trial in that east African country.

Speaking to our UK correspondent, Chief Charles Taku said “I am deeply honored to have been elected by my peers as president of the International Criminal Court Bar Association.” It is vital to include in this report that the president of the International Criminal Court, the Chief Prosecutor and the head of the bar association are all from the African continent.

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By Soter Agbaw-Ebai

Over 1,000 people protested outside the federal courthouse for the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville on Thursday, decrying the separation of undocumented children from their parents.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Campaigns Director Natalie Montelongo was attended the protest. She said: “there was a recent injunction that happened two nights ago that demanded that children under five be reunited within 14 days and the rest of the children within 30 days, but we must continue vocalising our views and mobilising in action to make sure the administration implements that.”

Another protester, Ryan, said that it was fundamental that people start taking action. “We absolutely have to occupy spaces. This won’t be done through voting anymore. We cannot turn this around through legislation or bureaucracy”, he said.

The immigration policy which entailed separating children from their parents as the parents awaited trial caused intense criticism both within the country and abroad. Trump eventually signed an executive order allowing children to remain with their parents as they wait for trial.

Source: Ruptly

Malian forces involved in the fight against Islamist militants in the West African nation executed 12 civilians in retaliation after a soldier was killed in an attack in May, the U.N. mission in Mali said on Tuesday.

Mali’s fight against jihadist groups in the centre and north of the country has been marred by a series of alleged abuses, some of which the government has acknowledged.

Those abuses, as well as tit-for-tat attacks by rival ethnic groups, have fuelled surging violence across vast swathes of Mali, raising doubts about the government’s ability to organise a presidential election scheduled for July 29.

The U.N. mission in Mali, MINUSMA, said in a statement that its investigation had concluded that Malian troops from the G5 Sahel – a joint task force with Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania – “summarily and/or arbitrarily executed 12 civilians at the Boulkessy cattle market” on May 19.

It said that the report has been handed to Mali’s government and that Mahamat Saleh Annadif, the head of MINUSMA, “calls on the Malian authorities to ensure that the investigation underway is carried out as quickly as possible”.

There was no immediate comment from Malian authorities. ​

Mali’s government said last week that some of its soldiers were implicated in gross rights violations after the discovery of mass graves in central Mali. Rights groups have alleged widespread abuses, but the government has rejected those claims.

Source: Africa News

Cameroon’s government says the number of soldiers and police killed while fighting armed English-speaking separatists who want to split from the French speaking regions of the country has increased from 80 to more than 100 in the last two weeks and kidnapping of members of the security forces also continue to rise.

With civilians and separatists complaining of widespread human rights abuses by the military and police, calls are growing for genuine dialogue to end the war.

Members of civil society are pressing Cameroonian President Paul Biya to free arrested leaders of armed groups for peace to return and the carnage to stop.

Speaking before an unusually quiet parliament, Cameroon Defense Minister Joseph Beti Assomo read the names of soldiers and policemen who have died in the war against armed separatists fighting for the independence of an English-speaking-state in Cameroon.

As Beti Assomo read through the list, VOA counted more than 120 names of slain servicemen.

The defense minister was invited by the lawmakers to give a balance sheet of a war that Cameroon president Paul Biya declared seven months ago against people he said were “terrorists” wanting to divide his country.

Robert Bapooh Lipot, a UPC opposition political party lawmaker, says it was the most touching plenary session of parliament he has ever witnessed in Cameroon.

“This is the worst thing which can happen to a soldier,” he said. “A soldier knows that he can die while defending the integrity of his nation against another army, but never against its own citizens. That is why we think that those who took guns against our nation, they must now abandon this option and know that we are belonging to the same country.”

The figures given by Beti Assomo indicate that about 40 more soldiers had lost their lives in less than one week since Cameroon’s prime minister, Philemon Yang, announced that the country had lost about 84 military and policemen and launched a $23 million emergency humanitarian assistance plan for hundreds of thousands of citizens who he said live in precarious and life-threatening conditions in Cameroon and in neighboring Nigeria due to war.

He said hundreds had been killed, and 74,000 internally displaced persons were facing famine along with disastrous health conditions. He said 21,000 others had fled to Nigeria.

United Nations estimates are even higher. The world body says more than 100,000 people, a majority of them school-aged children, have fled the violence in the English-speaking regions for safer locations. Forty thousand have crossed over to Nigeria and many are missing.

A new report published two weeks ago by the international human rights group Amnesty International criticizes both the Cameroon military and armed separatists for using unnecessary and excessive force, stating that civilians are frequently caught up in the violence.

Amnesty said Cameroon’s military has been responding with arbitrary arrests, torture, unlawful killings and destruction of property, which the group says radicalizes youths and drives them to join the separatists. Cameroonian government officials described Amnesty’s allegations as unfounded.

Emmanuel Tatah, a civil society activist and leader of a group known as Unite Cameroon, says the conflict continues to claim lives because many people do not trust the military and the leadership.

“We should be guided by truth. There is a lack of confidence between the people, the government and the institutions,” he said.

There have been calls for President Biya to be open to dialogue and to release Ayuk Tabe, the man who proclaimed himself as president of what he called the English-speaking “Republic of Ambazonia.” Tabe was arrested in Nigeria with 47 of his collaborators and extradited to Cameroon. His supporters have vowed on social media that Cameroon will not have peace if he and his peers are not released.

Violence broke out in the English-speaking northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon in November 2016 when a strike by English-speaking lawyers and teachers against what they described a marginalization by the French-speaking majority in the bilingual country degenerated into calls for secession. In November 2017, President Paul Biya declared war on the separatists, labeling them “terrorists.”

Biya has said on several occasions he is not ready to listen to anything that may compromise the unity of his country.

Source: VOA

A former baron of the Biya Francophone regime with strong ties to the Francophone dominated security services in Yaoundé has hinted Cameroon Intelligence Report that the Cameroon government has hatched diabolic plots aimed at the assassination of prominent Southern Cameroons activists in Europe and America including Mark Bareta, Eric Tataw and Tapang Ivo. The onetime cabinet minister and close aide to President Biya told our chief intelligence officer in Yaoundé that the Biya regime has set up numerous anti Ambazonian cells in Europe and the USA, which are led by the security chiefs of the various Cameroon embassies.

The Biya acolyte whose name we are withholding went on to say Yaoundé has requested and gotten the support of some countries in the CEMAC region to help in carrying out the mission. We also gathered from a well-placed source that discussions were held on whether to recruit the services of assassination squads in Eastern Europe or in South Africa.

A huge number of Francophone army soldiers have been deployed to Southern Cameroons and tasked with gunning down family relations of those serving with the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia. All these would-be assassins have been told to operate as factions within the Ambazonia Restoration Forces but must obey commands being issued by the military leadership based in Buea, our source disclosed.

Ever since the crisis in Southern Cameroons started two years ago, Francophone army officers have tortured and sexually abused hundreds of Ambazonia detainees at their detention centers in Yaoundé, Mbouda, Douala and Buea. Many of the Southern Cameroonians, who are held without charges, have been sodomized, raped, probed and stripped down in Kondengui and New Bell prisons.

Ambazonian detainees who resisted were killed and those still being held are wishing for death every day and can’t find it. The French government is French Cameroun’s key partner in its deadly war against Southern Cameroons. The United Nations announced in a statement recently that the crisis in Southern Cameroons had left 160,000 civilians displaced and many injured. The United Nations also stated that it had registered some 21,000 Southern Cameroons refugees in the Cross River State in Nigeria.

By Chi Prudence Asong

UN human rights investigators have accused security forces and militia fighters in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) of committing atrocities amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity in the restive central region of Kasai.

In a report denouncing “a serious problem of impunity”, the investigators on Tuesday called on the Kinshasa government to prosecute perpetrators and provide justice to victims.

“Some of the abuses committed by the defense and security forces, the (pro-government) Bana Mura militia and the (rebel) Kamwina Nsapu militia constitute crimes against humanity (and) war crimes,” independent experts said in the report, which will be presented to the UN Rights Council next month.

The UN report, based on interviews with 524 victims, witnesses and perpetrators, focused on violations in Kasai.

The ethnic conflict was marked by the burning down of villages, the UN report said, and Kamwina Nsapu forced child soldiers to decapitate enemies.

The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and the allied militia opposed the Kamwina Nsapu militia in a partially ethnic conflict that largely ended at the end of 2017. The year-long rebellion killed up to 5,000 people and forced some 1.5 million people from their homes.

“Numerous acts have been committed by the FARDC and the Kamwina Nsapu militia against people not participating directly in the hostilities … including murder, mutilation, rape and other forms of sexual violence, looting … and conscription of children under age 15,” the report said.

“Many children have been abducted, wounded, mutilated, detained or executed,” the report said. “Some saw their parents beaten, decapitated or their mothers raped. Many were forced to fight, put on the front lines without arms or with fake weapons, knives and sometimes traditional rifles. They were forced to kill and decapitate,” it said.

In July 2017, a Congolese court convicted seven soldiers of the murder of suspected militia members in Kasai after a video showed soldiers shooting people at point blank range.

Back in March, militants also killed two UN workers, a Swede and an American, after abducting them in the same region.

Over a dozen people have been detained in connection with the crime but separate UN experts complained that Congolese authorities were obstructing their efforts to assist probe.

The conflict in the previously peaceful Kasai region was one of a series of deadly flare-ups to hit Congo around the time long-serving President Joseph Kabila. The guerrilla movement has been leading a bloody rebellion against moves by Kabila to extend his stay in power.

The UN, which has discovered dozens of mass graves in the area, accuses both security forces and the militants of gross human rights violations.

Millions died in wars around the turn of the century across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The UN food agency warned last year that more than three million people were at risk of starvation in in Congo’s Kasai province.
Source: Presstv